Museum world's king of memes brings humour to lockdown

A ham depicted as an isolated office worker (left), submitted in response to a post by the British Royal Academy of Arts’ social media editor Adam Koszary (right). PHOTOS: NYTIMES, THENICKBOWLING/ TWITTER

LONDON • On March 18, the Royal Academy of Arts - one of Britain's grandest art museums, closed because of the coronavirus pandemic - issued a challenge on Twitter.

"Who can draw us the best ham," it read. It did not even bother with a question mark.

Dozens of newly drawn images soon flooded in from around the world, from an art nouveau ham to a tiny leg done in watercolours. There was even a ham re-imagined as an isolated office worker, slouched over a laptop.

That tweet was just the latest quirky success from Mr Adam Koszary, the Royal Academy's social media editor, whose flippant, conversational approach to Twitter has gotten him so much attention over the past two years that one of Silicon Valley's biggest companies briefly lured him away.

As museums worldwide go into prolonged lockdown, they are relying on their websites and social media accounts to connect with the public, and even to raise money.

And, in the fight for attention online, Mr Koszary's irreverent approach is being watched and copied.

Ms Claire Lanier, social media manager for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, called Mr Koszary "a legend". She said he had changed how museums speak online by "giving them permission to be jokey and colloquial and informal".

In a telephone interview, Mr Koszary laughed when asked if his approach should be imitated.

"The worst thing you can tell someone is to be funny. People should copy me to the extent that they should try and form proper human connections," he said. "But that doesn't mean everyone should be tweeting requests for ham."

Mr Koszary probably never expected to be a social media guru. He studied ancient history at college and briefly tried teaching.

In 2013, he accepted an administrative and curatorial job at the tiny Museum of English Rural Life in Reading, about 65km west of London.

Mr Koszary did not have any special knowledge about living in the countryside, but said he loved the museum's collections, which include wagons used to transport turnips and artificial insemination equipment for cows.

The collections can seem odd at first glance, he said, but "once you start getting into the history, the stories of rural life, it's fascinating".

"I could go on for hours about wagons," he added.

When the museum closed for a two-year refurbishment, Mr Koszary started helping out with its social media.

His first real success came in April 2018, when he decided to search the museum's photo archive for an animal with unusual horns for International Unicorn Day. He came across an enormous sheep.

As soon as he saw it, the phrase "absolute unit" - Internet speak for something huge - popped into his head, he said.

It quickly amassed over 100,000 likes, gathering so much attention that several British newspapers profiled the museum.

Mr Koszary repeated the trick several times with off-the-wall images from the museum's collection, including an 18th-century doodle of a chicken wearing pants.

As the Museum of English Rural Life's follower count grew, so did its visitor numbers, its marketing manager Alison Hilton said in an e-mail. Around 50,000 people visited the museum last year, up from around 28,000 in 2017.

Mr Koszary's success was also noticed outside the museum world.

In April last year, Tesla founder Elon Musk - a man with his own history of using Twitter to grab attention - changed his Twitter photo to the "absolute unit" sheep and started a Twitter conversation with Mr Koszary.

Soon afterwards, Mr Musk hired him. It seemed a perfect match, but their time together lasted less than six months. Mr Koszary said he felt "incredibly lucky" that the Royal Academy, which had offered him a job before he went to Tesla, took him back afterwards.

Asked about his approach to the museum's social media during the coronavirus pandemic, Mr Koszary said people seemed to want light relief from the news.

But, he added, light-hearted tweets would not be enough to get museums through this difficult period.

Instead, he said, the Royal Academy's social team was trying to reflect all aspects of how people were feeling - "this weird mixture of scared and bored".

Mr Koszary said the one thing museums should avoid was what most of them seemed to be focusing on right now: simply posting images from their closed collections and exhibitions.

"A lot of people are going to fall into the trap of just trying to give people what they'd come to see in person on the screen, but social media doesn't work like that," he said. "It's meant to be collaborative, democratic."

That needs to be realised, especially as the pandemic gets worse, he added. "Arts and heritage can't possibly fix coronavirus, but we can try and do something to help the sadness and fear."

Sometimes, that includes paintings of ham.

NYTIMES

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Straits Times on April 02, 2020, with the headline Museum world's king of memes brings humour to lockdown. Subscribe